The Summer of Arcade Sucks

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

The Summer of Arcade Sucks

Yahtzee takes a look at some of the Xbox's other Summer of Arcade offerings.

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[Balkan]

Two years in a row , there was an XBLA arcade tittle yz`s best of the year list . Shame really . Guess PSN`s line up for 2012 was better with Journey .By line up I mean only one game that is actually decent .
The end of the world will be marked with one of the shitiest game list in the recent history .
The only really good game that came out was Spec ops .

 

[Scrustle]

Although I disagree about the combat in Dust, it's good someone mentioned the colours of the protagonist's outfit. It really is awful.

 

[AdamG3691]

I like the colour cyan :<

 

[Zaik]

Loosely related story, I noticed in Tribes: Ascend there were a lot of people who had a specific team they preferred to play for. They were functionally identical, like TF2, on mostly mirrored maps, like TF2, with all the same classes accessible on both, like TF2.

And yet every game has at least one Blood Eagle(red) or Diamond Sword(blue) loyalist. It was bizarre.

The only difference I can think of at all is that rather than a single announcer for both teams, red has Vegeta and blue has some random woman.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

You probably thought I was going to be down on the whole furry art thing, didn't you. Well, I don't want to be one of those internet guys who claims that everyone who does the anthropomorphic art thing secretly wants to fuck dogs, because I'm sure it's just a vocal 90-95% percent who do.

That made me laugh.

 

[Andrewtheeviscerator]

This is completely false. Everyone knows you join the team that's winning in Team Fortress 2.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I tend to go out of my way to play as blue team in TF2, because on maps where one team attacks and the other defends (payload, CP, etc.), blue does the attacking, while red does the defending. I'll take a hard fought loss as blue over a victory on red any day, because of how boring defense duty frequently winds up being.

Edit: for those unfamiliar with the game, imagine sitting in one spot as medic, popping the occasional uber and defending it for 10 solid minutes. Congratulations, you've imagined a red victory at the last point on a payload map.

 

[Mr_Terrific]

Hybrid doesn't even have the distinction of being innovating with its only moving from cover to cover as the equally awful free to play No Man's Land has the same set up. It fails there as well.

 

[Warforger]

I think he's looking too much into Hybrid. On paper it sounds like the most generic idea ever but in practice it's actually quite fun and he does mention that. Honestly I found it to be a good game, not a great one, I mean i doubt anyone cares about the global conflict because either team you play you still level up the same and can buy guns for either side. The actual gameplay works great, the restricted mobility as at first is a bit awkward and the movement while in cover is a bit stiff (which I imagine it must be considering how crowded it can get) but you quickly find you can still go around and hit the enemy from behind. The only gun I won't ever understand is the sniper rifle, for a game that gets you into such close quarters there doesn't seem to be too many situations where it becomes useful.

But yah aside from an intro sequence in which even the narrator doesn't know what the story is (quite literally she just says lots of people died and that they have to fight the bad guys) there doesn't seem to even be one. Not that anyone really even cares about either faction or the story.

 

[CBanana]

It seems to me that XBLA/XBLIG has a huge problem in that indie developers seem to hate it and/or find significantly more profit on other platforms:

Braid
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/126427/Interview_Jonathan_Blow__Xbox_Live_Arcade_A_Pain_In_The_Ass_For_Indies.php

Dungeon Defenders
http://dungeondefenders.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Guyde/The_cost_of_patching_a_console_game
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/11/02/dungeon-defenders-sales-hit-250k-majority-on-pc/

Fez
http://www.destructoid.com/fez-patch-won-t-be-fixed-because-it-costs-too-much-231618.phtml

Orcs Must Die 2
http://www.robotentertainment.com/forum/topic/Orcs-Must-Die-2-XBLA

Super Meat Boy
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/01/beefy-super-meat-boy-pc-outsells-360/

They Bleed Pixels
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119019-Horror-Platformer-They-Bleed-Pixels-Ditches-XBLA-for-Steam

All
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.331724-Indie-Devs-Unhappy-With-Xbox-Live-Dashboard-Update

It seems that this all adds up to the point where a lot of quality indie developers are simply refusing to develop for the XBOX.

 

[Formica Archonis]

​

Great, now I want to play Usagi Yojimbo [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samurai_Warrior:_The_Battles_of_Usagi_Yojimbo] again.

I know I'd be horrible at it, though. The precision it required was fine when I was a teenager, but these days? Remembering just how long to hold the button for different strikes? Forget it!

 

[number2301]

One last word on Dust's visual design, though; we should have all figured out that cyan is a fucking hideous color around the C64 period. Please don't dress your main character exclusively in it.

Colour, colour damn it! What happened to you Yahtzee? You used to be English

 

[Punch You]

One last word on Dust's visual design, though; we should have all figured out that cyan is a fucking hideous color around the C64 period. Please don't dress your main character exclusively in it.

Colour, colour damn it! What happened to you Yahtzee? You used to be English

He spellchecked, and removed unnecessary letters from a word, like a NORMAL person would do.

also, pedophile doesn't have an A. You can't waste too much time typing extra letters when warning people about child predators.

 

[BoredWalker]

I really have to disagree with him on Dust's combat, I felt more in control of my character in that game than in any other, because I could actually move faster and maneuver better than an overloaded grocery cart. However, the damage really does scale badly; as soon as you get your first level-up, the enemies all go from "barrels of health" to "dead in a few seconds" threat status.

 

[duchaked]

oh right last year for the SoA there was "Bastion" ...no comparison :] that game was awesome

 

[Two-A]

So, the guy ignored Sound Shapes, Dyad, Rainbow Moon and Papa and Yo for a remake, a kinect Angry Birds clone, two generic games, and a multiplayer shooter, yet blamed the XBLA for this. I mean, when you get fleas from petting a mangy dog, do you blame the dog?

Well, he was talking about the XBLA platform. It's not like he said that all of this summer releases were bad, just the ones in XBLA.